Images from the Taste of Summer Britt Season Opening Celebration 2012

There were an amazing number of people in town for this year’s celebration of the opening of the Britt Festival’s concert season! All kinds of interesting things were happening around town, and the presence of our group’s art and artists was not the least, with artists demonstrations and the exhibition of member works at the Art Center in the former Children’s Museum attracting their share of attention.

We saw many friends of Art Presence while out and about. When stopping by Cheryl D. Garcia’s booth on 3rd Street we saw Heather Atlas Crow, formerly of the Rogue Gallery & Art Center and now with the Craterian Theater, having a lovely chat and participating in Cheryl’s recently announced Scavenger Hunt by very enthusiastically making sure she had pictures of herself with different pieces of Cheryl’s. When walking back over to the Art Center we ran into the lovely Brooke Nuckles-Gentekos, Rogue Gallery & Art Center’s new Education Director. Her parents were visiting from Pennsylvania and she was showing them around. It was lunchtime and they were ready for an eat, but the Art Center was next on their agenda! We congratulated the Britt Festival‘s new Executive Director Donna Briggs on this year’s incredible lineup of concerts while talking with Anne Brooke, and Art Presence artist member Susan De Rosa and her husband came by, just back from the coast and visiting the artists on 3rd Street, announced that they had just submitted an offer for a townhouse in Jacksonville they had fallen in love with. They were so excited, we hope this comes through for them!

Cammy Davis made a sale “in absentia” – she’s in Seattle this weekend for her daughter’s graduation, but we witnessed Peter Coons and Duane Sample swiping a very nice couple’s credit card and handing them Cammy’s earthy painting of a tree! They were here from California visiting their son and decided to check out the action in Jacksonville…and were very pleasantly surprised! They’ll be back.

And we saw Anne get a little wobbly and teary-eyed after receiving a donation for $250, earmarked for the Art Center’s sign! I won’t mention the donor’s name since I’m not sure at this point if they would like to remain anonymous. This very generous donation, added to an earlier donation for $100 which was also earmarked for our new sign, completes the amount that was quoted and will allow us to leap into the sign’s creation after (crossing our fingers here…) the approval of our application with the City of Jacksonville during the June 20 hearing scheduled for its review. Woo!!

Hannah West has started this post with the photos she took throughout the day’s event – if you also captured some nice images or have details, captions or anything else to add, please register and log in, then edit this post or send them to Hannah at soar@soartists.com and she’ll add them for you. If you’re registering & logging in for the first time, you’ll need to email Hannah so she can bump up your privileges (we keep the default access privileges set to Subscriber for security’s sake, but any Art Presence member is welcome to create and edit posts on behalf of Art Presence).